


Yogurt

by hojichadust



Category: EXO (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 18:43:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6819697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hojichadust/pseuds/hojichadust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>Prompt:</b> 24<br/><b>Pairing:</b> Seulgi/Kai (EXO)<br/><b>Rating:</b> PG<br/><b>Author's note:</b> writing this in under 2k was such a challenge but i did my best!! hope you like it!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Yogurt

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** 24  
>  **Pairing:** Seulgi/Kai (EXO)  
>  **Rating:** PG  
>  **Author's note:** writing this in under 2k was such a challenge but i did my best!! hope you like it!

“WHY?” her friend yells into the phone, so loudly that Seulgi winces in pain and thrusts her phone away from ear. “You said two days ago that you’d be free! We’re going to have uneven numbers now!”

“Sorry, unnie,” Seulgi says, glancing around to make sure no one else on the street could hear the screaming on the other end. “Evaluation’s tomorrow. I have to perfect the routine.”

“You have evaluations every week!” her friend whines. “Can’t you come just this once? It’s not like your dancing’s going to get any worse.”

“Maybe, but it won’t get better, either. If they don’t think I’m improving they’re gonna flunk me out. Anyways, text me later? Maybe I’ll come after practice, if you’re still there.”

“You better. They’ll never let me hear the end of it if I don’t bring enough girls.”

“Alright, alright. Talk to you later.”

“Okay.”

Seulgi hangs up and shoves her phone in the back pocket. There’s actually a very low chance of her showing up to the group blind date—there’s no showers at the SM building and she’s just dressed in jeans and a t-shirt today. She doesn’t have any makeup on, either, so she’s sure she won’t make great company with her bare face, with a massive zit growing on her chin.

It’s a nice day out today, the sun bright and a gentle breeze ruffling the foliage of the nearby trees. The entrance to the SM building is quiet and abandoned; the only group promoting right now is Super Junior, but with half of them in the army and all of them growing old in general, they don’t garner as much hype as they once did. No hoards of pushy schoolgirls with massive cameras, waiting for them to show up in their van after finishing at Music Bank. Seulgi adjusts her cap over her forehead all the same as she waltzes up and pushes through the glass double-doors of the building.

There’s one lone security guard at the doors, who recognizes her and nods in greeting, which Seulgi returns. She takes two, maybe three more steps, before she hears the sound of the elevator doors opening up at the end of the hall. She looks over, and the person who’s just stepped inside turns around to press his floor button when he sees her.

Their eyes lock.

As if on reflex, Kim Jongin turns with sudden urgency and starts jamming on one of the buttons inside of the elevator, one that could only be the “close-door” button. An eruption of red-hot anger flares up inside of Seulgi at the sight, instantly enraged.

“HEY!” she yells, booking it down the hallway, the sound of her footsteps thundering in her wake. Jongin starts pushing it more frantically, but it’s no use— Seulgi squeezes in with the elevator door is halfway closed, the momentum of her sprint sending her crashing into the back wall of the elevator. 

“What do you think you’re doing, you bastard?!” Seulgi half-pants, half-spits, while the elevator doors close completely with a docile click. 

“I was trying to take the elevator without you, if you couldn’t tell!” Jongin snaps back, as if this is blaringly obvious. “Why would you run for it? With your figure, you’d probably be better off taking the stairs off anyway.”

“Oh yeah?!”

“Yea—hey, what’re you—WHAT THE FUCK! Why are you pressing every single floor button?! Are you crazy?!”

“Get your hands off me!” Seulgi yells, wildly fighting off Jongin’s attempts to yank her away from the buttons, and the elevator instantly turns into a flurry of hands slapping at each other. “If you were trying to make me late for practice then why shouldn’t I do the same?!” 

“Seriously? Are you really that immature? What grade is this? Is this kindergarten? Are we really back in kindergarten right now?!”

“I’m the immature one? You started this!”

“ _I_ started this?”

“Who was it that was trying to close the doors before I got here, you dumb fuck? The close-door buttons aren’t even _functional_. Most of them are placebos.”

“What do you mean they’re placebos? They’re not placebos, if you press the button the elevator door closes!”

“That’s only because you’re expecting it to close, idiot! That’s the whole point of placebos!”

“I’ve never heard such random bullshit in my life!”

“Go ahead and look it up and tell me if it’s bullshit!” Seulgi yells in his face.

The elevator opens up on the third floor. Byun Baekhyun’s on the other side, glancing up first at the elevator’s arrows, indicating their direction, and then at them. “Is this going down?” he asks. 

“No,” Seulgi and Jongin say together, polite yet terse.

Baekhyun nods slowly, finally reading the atmosphere. “Right. Have fun,” he says, and the elevator doors shut. 

Seulgi huffs, removing her cap to push her hair away from her face. “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve got me so angry that I didn’t even greet that sunbae properly.”

“The hell? Since when have you ever cared about sunbaes? _I’m_ your sunbae, shouldn’t you be speaking politely to me?”

“Like hell I will! You’ve had it out for me since I first got here, even after I brought yogurt and treated everyone! Couldn’t you have just drunk it and acted like a normal person?”

“That yogurt was warm! It gave me indigestion!”

“DOES IT LOOK LIKE I CARE??”

The elevator dings again. This time it’s Park Sooyoung, probably back from vocal training. She blinks when she instantly senses the static between the two people inside the elevator. “Uh, is this a bad—”

“No!” Seulgi and Jongin snap, without actually looking away from the glare they’re sharing, and Sooyoung automatically lifts both hands up in defeat, eyebrows raised as she walks away. 

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?” Seulgi says, just as the doors close. “Do you really think that you’re so much better than everyone that you can just talk down to whoever you want?”

“The hell you on about?”

“You know what I’m on about!”

“No, I don’t!”

“You never even tried to get to know me!” Seulgi explodes. “It’s been the same shit since day one! You just decided when you first met me that I was competition or something! Did it really bother you so much that people liked coming to watch me dance too? You’ve never even tried to be nice to me!”

Something in Jongin’s face flinches, but his expression quickly turns incredulous. “Is that what you really think? That I’m scared that you might be more talented than me?”

Hearing it out loud, in someone else’s voice other than her own, Seulgi realizes how incredibly arrogant that sounded, and another wave of anger fills her, fuelled by her embarrassment. 

“Isn’t it?” she demands, a challenge. “Go on. Just tell me you hate me because you can’t stand your _hoobae_ one-upping you.” 

Jongin’s mouth presses into a thin line, just as the elevator finally reaches his floor. Out of nowhere, he reaches out and snatches her wrist. “Come with me.”

“What the hell? Hey! This isn’t even my floor!” Seulgi protests, trying to yank her arm away, but Jongin’s stronger than he looks, and he successfully manages to drag her out of the elevator, screeching and all. 

“Will you keep it down, goddamn!” Jongin opens the door to his practice room and shoves her inside first, and Seulgi stumbles in, huffing and ready to breathe fire. Jongin closes the door behind them, and the large empty room echoes the sound of their laboured breathing. 

“What do you want?” Seulgi snaps coldly. “Hurry up, I don’t have time for this.”

“Just give me one minute, will you?” Jongin runs his hand through his hair. He suddenly looks frustrated, and tired, which is really nothing new, especially among trainees. But Jongin looks like he’s at a loss for words, which is definitely something new. Jongin’s never at a loss for words—childish insults is his mother tongue.

“You think I hate you?” Jongin asks. “Because I’m jealous of you?”

The questioning tone to the accusation takes Seulgi aback. She blinks at him. “Don’t you?” she says, before she can think up a better answer.

Jongin sighs. “You’re…I can appreciate another good dancer when I see one. And you’re good. Hyoyeon-noona’s said so, too.”

“But you’ve never even seen me dance. You never came by,” Seulgi protests. 

“Of course I have,” Jongin answers immediately. “You’ve just never noticed me.”

The confession is shocking, to say the least. Seulgi opens her mouth and closes it, stunned. “You’ve…you’ve seen me dance?”

A bit of colour seems to creep into Jongin’s face, and he looks away at the ground. “I mean. Towards the back, yeah. If a bunch of people were there already. Or I’d kind of look in, on my way out sometimes. You’re pretty focused when you dance. So you never noticed me.”

“Then I don’t understand,” Seulgi says, frowning. “Did somebody say something to you about me? I’ve never said—well, I mean, before all this—” she loosely motioned with her hand between the two of them, “I never said anything bad about you. You were, like, the star rookie.”

“That doesn’t mean everyone likes me,” Jongin says tersely. “If anything it only gave people more to say. That I think I’m hot shit, that I don’t talk to anyone because I’m better than everyone else. Right? Don’t tell me you haven’t heard any of the others say those things about me.”

Seulgi had. In fact, it was the common opinion throughout the building, with anyone who never had opportunity to talk to him or hang out with him. And it’s hard to admit, but after a while she began to believe everyone. She doesn’t say anything in response, rightly ashamed. 

Jongin shifts on his spot, looking at the ground again, licking his lips. Seulgi’s never had opportunity to properly look at him—usually the two of them were too busy fighting for her to take a moment—but she has a moment now, and she discovers that some of the other rumors are true, that he really is ridiculously handsome. His cat-like eyes and defined jaw and full, pouty lips are only a few of his many good qualities. Seulgi suddenly wishes she were wearing makeup, so that her monolids weren’t so prominent. 

“I, um…” Jongin turns red again as he speaks. It hits Seulgi, suddenly, that this isn’t her first time seeing this—in fact, he was flushed frequently when they crossed paths. 

“I’m not good at talking to strangers,” Jongin says. “I always come off as creepy or weird. Ask poor Kyungsoo-hyung. I told the others once I didn’t want to eat with him because I thought he was glaring at me, but it turns out he just didn’t have his glasses on. He’s blind as shit without them.” 

“Okay,” Seulgi says quizzically, not sure where this is going. 

“Well, I mean…” Jongin sighs in frustration. “I asked one of the guys, you know, Moonkyu. Cause it’s even worse with girls, usually, but he never seems to have any trouble. And he told me this…thing, where you kind of…start banter? Like, pretend to fight with them. So I tried, but…”

Seulgi knows. In fact, she remembers it clearly—Jongin approached her, maybe two weeks after she started training at the building, and out of nowhere bluntly told her that she should fix her duck feet when she was dancing. She practiced with her toes pointed inward for _months_ after that.

“Are you telling me,” Seulgi says slowly, “that you took advice on talking to girls from the guy who currently hasn’t—and never had—a girlfriend?”

Jongin just stands there, utterly embarrassed, unable to say anything. He can’t even look her in the eye. 

Seulgi squats down in her spot and puts her head between her knees. The utter ridiculousness of it all is giving her a splitting headache. “I’m gonna kill Moonkyu.”

“I’m gonna come with you,” Jongin mutters.

Seulgi sighs, then stands upright again, flipping her hair back and out of the way. “Alright,” she says finally. “Let’s say I believe you. How do I know for sure it’s not some dumb ruse?”

For a moment, Jongin seems to flounder. Apparently he wasn’t prepared for that. “I, uh…I can buy you ddeokboki when you’re finished?” he says, once again with a red face. “To show that I’m really serious.” 

He definitely looks serious—or, at least, he looks earnestly hopeful, his dark eyes trying to search her face for a response. Seulgi rubs the back of her neck, thinking about her friend and their group date tonight, and thinking, also, about how this was the first amicable conversation the two of them have ever had, that amidst all those rumors of Jongin being cold and arrogant, there are still a few people who insisted that Jongin is, in fact, a good guy. 

“Did my yogurt really give you indigestion?” Seulgi asks. 

Jongin looks confused for a moment, but then he remembers. “Yeah,” he admits. “I was on the toilet for hours.”

A grin spreads over Seulgi’s face. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”


End file.
